Lungeanu and Weber (2017)

Lungeanu, Razvan and Klaus Weber. “Janus-Faced Do-Gooders? Corporate Elites and Their Influence on Philanthropic and CSR Priorities.” Academy of Management Proceedings, November 2017.

From the authors’ abstract: “We…examine whether CEOs of firms with a good history of CSR involvement seek to express their social values across settings by joining the board of trustees of independent foundations. We then examine cases in which the same individual influences resource allocations made by two types of organizations: corporations, in the form of CSR efforts; and foundations, in the form of grants. Upper echelon theory predicts that the social causes they favor will be similar across settings, while the alternative view of moral compensation in psychology predicts that individuals compensate across domains, so that the corporate- and foundation-based allocations focus on complementary areas. We find evidence for behavioral consistency in the decision to join an independent foundation as a trustee, and of moral compensation in the selection of specific independent foundation and in the future allocation choices.”

Link: https://journals.aom.org/doi/abs/10.5465/ambpp.2017.17423abstract